An implant is an artificial tooth implanted into an alveolus when a tooth is lost or damaged. The implant has the following advantages: it allows only a lost or damaged tooth to be replaced without sacrificing adjacent teeth, it allows the artificial tooth to function like a natural tooth, it looks and feels like a natural tooth, it allows a patient to speak clearly after an operation, and it quickly improves the patient's oral health.
A general implant comprises a fixture embedded in the gum, an abutment fixed to the fixture by using a screw, and a crown fixed onto the abutment so as to give an external form of an artificial tooth. At this case, the abutment supports the crown.
Here, the abutment (hereinafter, referred to as a processing object) functions to transfer a load from the crown to the fixture, and hence to the jaw bone. For this reason, the processing object should be manufactured considering not only a size, a shape, and a contour of an artificial tooth, but also the occlusion with adjacent teeth and an opposing tooth (an upper tooth or lower tooth), and dental characteristics, conditions of the gum, and the gum line of an individual patient.
As for the processing object of the implant, customized products manufactured so as to correspond to patient's teeth are preferred to generic products having fixed sizes.